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Title:

Free Library, Southampton

Caption:

This colourised postcard shows the purpose-built Southampton Free Library in all its Victorian glory before it was decommissioned and its services relocated to the present civic centre site in 1939. Although the photographer is unattributed, newsagent and stationer Charles William Moor, whose business was just around along London Road, published the card. The free or public library movement had a chquered history in Southampton. John Fletcher of the famous bookselling and printing dynasty assisted Reverend Edward Edmunds in the compiling the Free Library's first catalogue in 1856. However, the Library's closure in the wake of the establishment of the Hartley Institution (est.1862) left many local philanthropists shaking their heads. After an extended and controversial series of site battles, they had to wait until 1893 to see this building erected. It was destroyed in the blitz of November 1940 along with much of the Ordnance Survey across the road.